Welcome to CORE

October 16, 2017 5:43 AM

Economics for a changing world - "An open-access platform for anyone who wants to understand the economics of innovation, inequality, environmental sustainability, and more..."

The teaching of economics gets an overdue overhaul - "Yet the standard curriculum is hardly calibrated to impart these lessons."

The CORE project (for Curriculum Open-access Resources in Economics) seeks to change all this. It sprang from student protests in Chile in 2011 over the perceived shortcomings of their lessons. A Chilean professor, Oscar Landerretche, worked with other economists to design a new curriculum. He, Sam Bowles, of the Santa Fe Institute, Wendy Carlin, of University College London (UCL), and Margaret Stevens, of Oxford University, painstakingly knitted contributions from economists around the world into a text that is free, online and offers interactive charts and videos of star economists. That text is the basis of economics modules taught by a small but growing number of instructors.

“The Economy”, as the book is economically titled, covers the usual subjects, but in a very different way. It begins with the biggest of big pictures, explaining how capitalism and industrialisation transformed the world, inviting students to contemplate how it arrived at where it is today. Messy complications, from environmental damage to inequality, are placed firmly in the foreground. It explains cost curves, as other introductory texts do, but in the context of the Industrial Revolution, thus exposing students to debates about why industrialisation kicked off when and where it did. Thomas Malthus’s ideas are used to teach students the uses and limitations of economic models, combining technical instruction with a valuable lesson from the history of economic thought. “The Economy” does not dumb down economics; it uses maths readily, keeping students engaged through the topicality of the material. Quite early on, students have lessons in the weirdness in economics—from game theory to power dynamics within firms—that makes the subject fascinating and useful but are skimmed over in most introductory courses.

Teaching the CORE curriculum feels like doing honest work, says Rajiv Sethi, of Barnard College, who contributed to the CORE textbook. Academic economists do not hide from students the complications they grapple with in their own research.

A New Way to Learn Economics - "The CORE approach isn't particularly radical. (Students looking for expositions of Marxian economics or Modern Monetary Theory will have to look elsewhere.) ... The CORE curriculum also takes economic history seriously... The text stresses that technical progress is the primary force driving economic growth. Citing the Yale economist William Nordhaus's famous study of the development of electric lighting, it illustrates how standard economic statistics, such as the gross domestic product, sometimes fail to fully account for this progress. Befitting a twenty-first-century text, sections devoted to the causes and consequences of technological innovation recur throughout the e-book, and the information economy receives its own chapter."

• Imperfect information dims the vision of a digital utopia
• The Understanding and Misunderstanding of Imperfect Information
• Economic models are broken, and economists have wildly different ideas about how to fix them
• Poisonous tendencies [1,2,3]

Using Big Data to Solve Economic and Social Problems - "This introductory course, taught by Raj Chetty, shows how 'big data' can be used to understand and solve some of the most important social and economic problems of our time. The course gives students an introduction to frontier research in applied economics and social science that does not require prior coursework in Economics or Statistics. Topics include equality of opportunity, education, health, the environment, and criminal justice. In the context of these topics, the course provides an introduction to basic statistical methods and data analysis techniques, including regression analysis, causal inference, quasi-experimental methods, and machine learning."

• Declining global poverty: share of people living in extreme poverty, 1820-2015
• The Case Against Civilization
• From plains to chains: how the state was born
• What do we do if the China model delivers more comprehensive national power than the Denmark model?

Adjusting to Trade... and Innovation - "Beyond the overly simplistic framing of trade as 'good' or 'bad' — by politicians, by Econ 101 — why is the topic of trade (or rather, economies and people adjusting to trade) so damn hard? A big part of it has to do with not seeing the human side of trade, let alone the big picture across time and place... as is true for many tech innovations, too... And where does China come in — and out — of this picture?"

Tyler Cowen's stubborn attachments - "Economist and polymathic author Tyler Cowen talks to Cardiff about his essay, 'Stubborn Attachments', in which he shares his vision for a free and prosperous society - and the philosophical foundations necessary to build it."

• The life and ideas of Albert O. Hirschman
• Hirschmania Part 2

Dan Drezner on the economics of ideas - "Dan Drezner, writer and professor of international politics, joins Cardiff Garcia to discuss his latest book, 'The Ideas Industry: how pessimists, partisans and plutocrats are transforming the marketplace of ideas'. They also talk about the global populist wave, identity-based politics, and how to resist the temptation to say yes to everything."

The inventor of microfinance has an idea for fixing capitalism - "The belief that money and wealth are the ultimate good has, Yunus thinks, given rise to three great societal ills: Unemployment, as competition for a set number of jobs; environmental destruction, which is accepted as a side-effect of economic growth; and poverty, an inevitable consequence of wealth concentration."

Does Finance Benefit Society? - "That the financial sector has made rent-seeking and the purchase of politicians into a fine art should come as no surprise."

The Financialization Of America... And Its Discontents - "Labor's share of the national income is in freefall as a direct result of the optimization of financialization."

The explanations include automation, globalization/offshoring, the high cost of housing, a decline of corporate competition (i.e. the dominance of cartels and quasi-monopolies), a failure of our educational complex to keep pace, stagnating gains in productivity, and so on.

Each of these dynamics may well exacerbate the trend, but they all dodge the dominant driver of wage stagnation and rise income-wealth inequality: our economy is optimized for financialization, not labor/earned income... capital and profits flow to the scarcities created by asymmetric access to information, leverage and cheap credit — the engines of financialization.

Financialization funnels the economy’s rewards to those with access to opaque financial processes and information flows, cheap central bank credit and private banking leverage.

Together, these enable financiers and corporations to get the borrowed capital needed to acquire and consolidate the productive assets of the economy, and commoditize those productive assets, i.e. turn them into financial instruments that can be bought and sold on the global marketplace...

The 5 Steps to World Domination - "You don't need an army to achieve World Domination; all you need is enough cheap credit to buy up everything that generates the highest value and/or income."

• Central Bank Quantitative Easing as an Emerging Political Liability
• Le blog de Thomas Piketty — Re-thinking the capital code
• Rethinking macro stabilization: Back to the future
• Capitalism's bad incentives
• The Importance of Fairness: A New Economic Vision for the Democratic Party

posted by kliuless (5 comments total)

Thanks, this looks great. I can't wait to dig into it.
posted by roolya_boolya at 8:21 AM on October 16, 2017

Anyone who considers T Malthus anything other than a crank, let alone a leading economist, is ignorant of economics.
posted by NeoRothbardian at 9:53 AM on October 16, 2017

Anyone who considers T Malthus anything other than a crank, let alone a leading economist, is ignorant of economics.

I think that's rather the point, old sport.
posted by No Robots at 10:03 AM on October 16, 2017 [3 favorites]

Anyone who considers T Malthus anything other than a crank, let alone a leading economist, is ignorant of economics.
posted by NeoRothbardian at 12:53 PM on October 16 [+] [!]

eponysterical?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 10:58 AM on October 16, 2017 [1 favorite]

more on financialization! part deux :P
posted by kliuless at 4:44 AM on November 8, 2017 [1 favorite]